The Round Up

I must confess, this post was written several moons ago, as part of a much longer one. The view from my window now is a very different one indeed. This year seems to have been one of Big Things, and sometimes they have become too overwhelming to deal with, let alone to write about. So in the spirit of making my way through one small piece at a time, I shall in time reveal the gems in the rubble, and in longer time hopefully the rubble itself. There are many shifts occurring, and us sensitive types are quite taken up by it. Making the space to feel is a bigger challenge than we might imagine. For now, I shall leave you with the colours of an Icelandic autumn, which filled my senses before I migrated southwards – a refugee of the darkness. This was written in late September from our home in the Westfjords.

It is that time of year again when the mountains outside my window become enshrouded in mist, and, clinging to their slopes the birch, berries and rowan trees ignite in a riotous palette of fire. The ravens have restored their positions as kings of sky and lamp post. They never went away in summer, but they seemed to take a background position – high, high in the sky – to the gulls and the arctic terns, who are now making their way to the southern hemisphere. It is a season that turns you to introspection; taking stock of the many stories of summer.

And it is time for the annual sheep round up. The sheep have been languishing in three months of sunshine up in the mountains, and now the winds are changing and it is time to come back to their birthplace. This year I have been involved with two gatherings and a lambing season, as the farmers of those flocks are part of a film that I’m making. Not to mention being an integral part of my inherited family’s, and now my circle here. The gatherings can be quite an event, involving a good part of the community of any given sveit (area of countryside) and their friends and extended family. It is a two day affair that requires stamina and hardship for the men and women on the mountain top, patience for the children who are sent up ravines and down to the shore to bring in stragglers, and an abundance of  restorative coffee, cake and meat soup to be served at the end of the day. This year there has been too much sun and too little rain. The majority of Westfjordian farmers have struggled to make enough hay to feed their flocks through the winter, so they are being forced to slaughter more sheep than usual.

Those who help with the gathering are usually given some meat once the chosen ones have been slaughtered, which usually happens a week or two later. I have to have a reality check sometimes when sights, such as my man coming home with a shoulder of lamb that he’s just cut from a whole one hanging in his parents’ garage, become normal. Though I much prefer this level of involvement in what I eat to shopping in a bland supermarket for meat wrapped in plastic – its story untold, its true origins unknown. Now begins again the season of eating meat, and sleeping long.

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Need teaches a naked woman to spin yarn

“Neyðin kennir naktri konu að spinna”.  So the Icelandic saying goes.

With the bustle of Christmas and the explosions in the sky that illuminated the changing of the year now all but disappeared, my thoughts and energies are turned towards discovering how a non-indigenous settler here goes about sustaining momentum through the winter months.

Þorri is upon us: a midwinter month from late January to late February according to the Old Icelandic Calendar, the name of which is believed to be the personification of frost. Days are extremely short, and have felt so since the Winter Solstice. Even though they are supposed to get longer from that point on, it has not felt like it, for here we are nestled deep within a steep sided valley. For a few weeks now that so cherished uplifting kiss of pink has not even graced the mountain top as it used to at just-after-lunch. Until today. And I tell you it made me gasp!

The darker-lighter

We have had regular snowfall and many days of its bright blanket settling in for a while. This makes a huge transformation to the landscape, as any light that exists – day or night –  is thrown around for all to share. Sometimes the mountains out across the sea seem to emit the light, and sometimes (and I still cannot fathom this ) as the day gets darker it gets brighter. But sometimes there are just incessant snowstorms and winds and the desire to venture even into the garden vanishes!

A Þorrablót

A feast to break the long winter days – Þorrablót – has begun, with gatherings happening over the next couple of weeks in people’s homes, at village halls and hotels. These gatherings involve eating a selection of Icelandic ‘delicacies’ such as sviðasulta (svið = singed boiled sheep’s head, sulta = jam), hangikjöt (smoked lamb) and súrsaðir hrútspungar (pickled ram’s testicles), and music and dancing. We went to a feast this weekend where the Ásatrúarfélag (‘ the company of Norse pagans’) priestess conducted a ceremony, passing a carved cow horn round in a circle from which each guest drank and hailed Þorri and/or whosoever they wished to hail!

Hangikjöt (literally ‘hung meat’) hanging in a smoke house

Back in December, the Winter Solstice was a special occasion also celebrated with members of the Ásatrúarfélag and participating in a ceremony, or blót. As Christmas is considered a time for winding down and turning in, and receiving guests and visiting others, the ceremony reflected on what being being a good host and a good guest really meant, and together with the priestess we chanted passages from the Hávamál. The purpose of the Ásatrúarfélag, though pagan in its inspiration, is to gather those with a belief to live in harmony with nature and the seasons, so that they can acknowledge and celebrate it together.

The duration of Advent saw all houses, buildings, boats and…tractors (!) bedecked with Christmas lights, turning the town- and village-scapes into Las Vegas abstracts. The dead did not miss out on the fun either…all cemeteries became alight with multi-coloured crosses! Christmas lights are serious business here. When we were trying to find a way to plug in the lights that coiled up our front steps, we realised the previous owner of our house had made a hole in her window frame specifically for this purpose, that was plugged for the rest of the year!

A week before Christmas we made a day trip to a small pine forest a few fjords away to gather Christmas trees for the family. Though it seems strange to chop down some of the very few trees in this country, they were planted intentionally close together to shelter each other and need occasional thinning. And so the deal was struck with the farmer and it has become a yearly tradition. It was almost like a pilgrimage and to travel so far for our tree made the occasion all the more special. It marked the start of the Christmas feeling. For Christmas my parents came from Kenya and my brother from England and squeezed into our little house and sat in hotpots in the snow and ate foods and experienced life a way they had never done before and may never do again! Coming to northern Iceland from Kenya must be akin to interplanetary travel and there’s not many that make it here in winter, let alone equatorial beings.

In the run up to New Year’s Eve, our village hall became a firework supermarket – trolleys and all! The proceeds made from fireworks in Iceland go directly to the mountain rescue service, which is a volunteer-led organisation, and so, in charitable spirit Icelanders stock-pile fireworks and set them off with reckless abandon. Some are named after characters from Icelandic sagas. I remember two years ago, in the midst of ‘the crisis’ I saw some repackaged to be called The Bankers – ideal for those wanting to metaphorically vent their frustration at the collapse of the economy.

The New Year’s celebrations involve all towns and villages first having an impossibly large bonfire stacked high with pallets and other burnable fishing community detritus. Ours was the size of a house, and (a popular trick in these parts) made more exciting by having buckets of petrol thrown on it (!). Then the official fireworks were let off, and in our valley they were as delicious to listen to as to see, as each crackle echoed between the  valley walls tenfold.

At midnight the anarchy began. Outside nearly every house and building, people brought their stash of charity-fireworks and lit them simultaneously.  They were in front of you, behind you, above you and either side, careering in all directions! It was a far cry from the roped-off affairs I have become used to in Britain. The ships in the harbour sounded their horns and torch bearers climbed the mountainside to light a figure of 2011.

And as it all fizzed and flickered to darkness again we looked up to see a black mountain silhouetted by a bright green sky. The aurora borealis had come to join in. According to folklore, the Northern Lights are elves dancing in the sky and you will never see them on New Year´s Eve because on that day the elves move house and come down to the ground to do so. They had obviously got settled in to their new house quickly this year as they were dancing again by a quarter past midnight. We bundled into the car and drove off to a disused road near our house that has no light pollution, and of course it was far more spectacular than any number of fireworks could be.

Our village with yonder mountains glowing blue

With celebrations over and visitors departed, this is perhaps the hardest time of year. There is not the feeling of Spring being around the corner, rather a knowledge that this freezing and melting cycle that is winter will continue for several more months and all there is to do is hunker down and get on with it. I have been impressed at how my neighbours in this village seem to use the cycle/walking paths in all weathers and sometimes you catch somebody walking backwards, their backs braced against the strong winds. I try to get out into the daylight hours whenever the weather is a little more still, to stretch my creaking limbs.

The gradual transformation of our house continues slowly – not aided much by the fact that the town’s only paint mixing machine has been broken for a week with no signs of recovery just yet! It is a strange season this Icelandic winter, as of course now is the time to be indoors and getting on with creative projects,  yet I find the dearth of  light cumulatively demotivating. For me, winter has always felt like a time when the year is holding its breath. The first phase is spent nesting and feeding, and sitting on creative ideas to see which feel good. And then begins the waiting. Waiting for a warmer breeze to come and blow the stillness away. Waiting for ideas to push up into the light and germinate. But of course here, you cannot just wait. It cannot be a breath holding exercise. I must learn to ‘be’ differently here for this part of the year that is much longer than the others.

But of course this adaptation cannot, will not, happen overnight. My mind and body seems to have gone into ‘sleep’ mode, where I can function when necessary but I must set myself goals and write them down lest I forget and wake up in a month’s time! My man Orri has gone to sea and so now I find myself the ultimate Icelandic cliché – the fisherman’s woman! To my surprise, for a few days at a time at least, I do not mind his absence, as I am forced to look at who I am here, and what I need to do to become part of this place, and to make it my own. And in this quite extreme environment, it acts like a magnifying glass, and lets me inspect the image so that in it I can find my own rhythm.

And sometimes, I forget about rhythm and I am taken by a moment where I see something I have never seen before because the right ingredients have come together at the right time to make something truly beautiful. Like ice forming suddenly  in a bay where the sea meets a river’s flow, in shapes I never could have dreamed existed. And that feeds me for days.

Need teaches a naked woman to spin yarn. I get it now.

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Upside Down Seasons

Since I last appeared here, which seems now like many moons ago, we have spread our wings and made our way to the Southern Hemisphere. It is a strange thing, to have had our seasons in reverse. I left you with tales of the gathering of sheep in October, and the sprinkling of snow and the feeling that winter had arrived. This sprinkling was followed by a rather more thorough carpeting, more deep than I have experienced since childhood.  I enjoyed the crunch underfoot of my meanderings and the way  forms were rendered in ‘absence’, with just a hint of a house or a wheel and the world became a black and white photograph. There were also some incredible icicles rooted like fangs to cliffs as the still falling spring water bubbled away inside them.

But, as is typical in Iceland, the weather changed from day to day, and we still enjoyed sunshiney visits to farms and shores and abandoned houses. It was a busy time as some of the sheep that had been gathered were slaughtered by the extended family and prepared in various ways, and everyone who had helped with the gathering and the slaughter was rewarded with a share of the meat. Kitchens were full of activity and smoke houses gently billowed their birch smoke. At the same time we were readying our little red van Mariubjalla for her imminent departure to Reykjavik, which involved finding a new set of tyres for a rare diameter size. I had started to worry, as there was no way we could drive south on snowy roads with the tyres that we had – bald as they were through to the wire mesh! But as with the majority of ‘problems’ in Iceland, we were provided for through a passing comment to a family friend.

I had been missing my friends terribly so was ready to leave for a while. We had planned a month long stop over in England specifically to spend some good times visiting people, and also to try and raise some pennies towards our onwards leg by doing some Christmas sales with my Cabinet of Curiosities from all over the world, and some hand made jewellery of mine. This is something I have been doing for many years now, in various forms. I have sold my wares on street corners and beaches, school halls, and church halls. A few years ago I discovered that some people, especially around Christmas time, liked me bringing my treasures to their house and transforming their living rooms into Aladdin’s caves. They could invite their friends and everyone had basketfulls of Interesting and Beautiful Things to peruse over a mince pie or two. I like this better than being out on the street as it feels more like a cosy gathering and I can tell the stories of where I found those objects. I managed to do a couple of these while back and through doing so had some surprise visits from friends.

We were ultimately heading to Kenya, where I spent my teenage years and where my parents and grandmother still live. I have not been home for Christmas in many years, and felt it was time. So Orri and I decided to make a trip of it and see out the worst of winter here. And so in a few blinks of an eye we went from vast shin deep Icelandic snowscapes to the damp and sunny orange leafed Autumn of England, and now we find ourselves sitting in the shade of trees and porches, and glad to be dry, even though it is the ‘rainy season’ here! It is strange to have my year this way round, but then there has been nothing ‘regular’ about this year, and I like it that way.

Tomorrow is an exciting day as we are heading to the north of Kenya to a region called Samburuland where I made a documentary in 2006, called After The Rains Came. I am going to visit all the people I spent the summer with that year, and to take a wedding video I have made to someone who married while I was there. This is no ordinary wedding video, mind you! The wedding lasted three days, involved a slaughter of a bull, highly decorated warriors leaping into the air and a lot of singing and dancing. Fortunately there have been rains up there recently. When I shot the film there had been a long drought, the end of which thankfully coincided with my arrival, but as a result I was given the Samburu name Nashangai, which means ‘The one who came with rain’. So there’s a bit of a pressure to deliver on subsequent visits…fingers crossed! I shall bring tales of that journey on my return.

In the meantime I would just like to say how touched I was by the number of people who have read this blog and loved it. When I was out in the wilds of Iceland wondering how many more hundred kilometers it would be until I found internet access, I sometimes wondered why I was doing this. ‘Was anybody actually reading it?’ I wondered. It turns out you were, and it suddenly felt like I had so much company on the ups and downs of this rolling road and people knew where I was at. Please do feel free to leave comments here to keep the connection going. It is most lovely to hear real comments straight from the horse’s mouth, but the fact is I am Here now… wherever There was, and the land of blog is a rock we can all stand on.

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A Gathering and a Sprinkling of Snow

My latest tales are brought to you from a newly indoors existence, as our Autumn journey nears its end. Just as I thought this time of year could not get any more beautiful, and that the colour palette could not have been chosen by a more talented artist, an unexpected sprinkling of snow landed overnight. We awoke to mountains whose contours had been highlighted in white, the sheep had started to move down to lower slopes, and the temperature was decidedly cooler. I had found myself sleeping fully clothed in woolens, a balaclava and with my head under the duvet (for fear of my nose  freezing and snapping off!). Our fleece cocoon had done a good job, but it was clearly nearing time for us to come down from our mountain too. Although we had a heater in the van, we were not inclined to use it as it is a very temporary respite, and does not ease the dampness much. Thankfully the sun remained with us, kissing the snow with its low rays, and the blue shadows clustering around the glowing red leaves of the blueberry bushes. We still had a few days on the road before reaching the Westfjords and enjoyed this new perspective. We continued gathering things we found on the ground, but now with a view to making Things rather than eating what we found.

Before the snow came we had spent an unusual amount of time among trees, which I very much enjoyed. I realised how much I need them. They are comforting, like company on a lonley night, and offer a kind of wise protection. On one of these occasions we had found a lovely grove of yew trees on the shores of a wide river – so wide that waves lapped at the pebble shore like a tide. After gathering wood for a fire on the beach and the inevitable picking of mushrooms and berries (it is so addictive!), we went to cook dinner and take it to the fire. Suddenly Orri said “Quick! Turn off the lantern!”. I looked up and in the dark sky was a dancing  mantle of green tickling night´s shoulders – there and not there; intricate and expansive. Seeing the Aurora Borealis has been a lifelong wish of mine, and I could not have hoped to see it in a better place. I stumbled down through the trees to the shore, cooking pots in hand, not wanting to take my eyes off the sky. We did not light the fire in the end as it would have disturbed the darkness. We settled into the Night for nature´s light show spectacular. I did not even think to take photographs!

We also had an adventure into the most treeless place I have encountered. Not even the small ones that crawl across the ground – the Hands and Knees Trees. We took a diversion from our predominantly coastal route into the interior in the Northwest. We drove many kilometres seeing no one. We were pummeled by a pummice storm, and shaken to pieces by the road. You may wonder why we put ourselves through such things, but there was a treasure to be found. We had heard about a hot spring  nestled in a valley. Unfortunatley we drove many kilometres in the wrong direction, but a happy meeting with a sole jeep driver´s local knowledge put us right and finally we found it: Laugarvellir (the field of the pool) a valley that became increasingly lush, and at the end of the road, a hot waterfall!!! I can hardly believe this exists, but it is the most inspiring wash I have ever had! We spent many hours there soaking in the heat, sinking our toes into the mud, and in the damp moss covered nooks and crannies watching the bejewelled webs of spiders tense and sway in the force of the spray.

Some days and nights had also been spent by houses of various kinds. One night on the east coast, we parked up by a runied house that still had traces of life once lived here. We used the old cast iron stove to contain our fire and burned wood from the structure. It occurred to me what a lovely paradox this was: that the house was providing us with warmth whilst still allowing us to be outside.

We stumbled upon an old bothy in some woods in the north, which probably provided shelter to someone back in the time when they would come and milk the sheep in situ rather than herding them back to the farm to do so.  Sheep in Iceland are still not kept fenced in at all. They roam freely all summer, sometimes in impossibly precarious places as we have seen! In September they naturally start making their way closer to their farms, and must be herded for the last part of the journey. Nowadays the milk is not used, and so these milkers´dwellings are left crumbling here and there.

Up the way was a grove of pines which filled our nostrils with their soothing scent on our evening scramble. We noticed sap dripping from them, encrusted on the bark, and decided to pick some to use as incense for Christmas presents. In the evening I cooked a meal in the milker´s bothy as it felt right to breathe life into that place again.

One day, by complete suprise, I found myself within a living, breathing house full of wood and the generous spirit of a sculptor, Erlendur Finnbogi. As if the web that we call Life had heard my lament for never seeming to get inside, on a short wonder around the small Old Town of Bluondos in the north, I spotted an interesting looking house whose creativity spilled out into the garden and onto the sea at the back. He had large experiments with rusty metal dancing awkwardly in the wind and things of wood and stone in the windows and poking out of the grass. As I admired one of these metal structures, a bearded man with a pipe in his mouth, puffed “I´m only playing; it´s not finished yet!”. We got chatting in his limited English and my limited Icelandic, and I decided it would be better to go and get Orri. He is always carving something in stone…scratch, scratch,  scratch…and I knew he´d love this. “Come in the front door when you come back, ” he  said. I was touched. We spent a lovely afternoon together sharing tales and having a tour of his amazing house. He bought it after a fire when it was barely a frame. Over time he has built it up with all manner of creative woodliness. I know we shall see him again.

That was a turning point for me, realising that there will be other people like that. Other interesting folk I haven´t met yet. There is something strange about the Icelandic psychology that dictates that winter starts on 1st September and on that day you go indoors. Everything ‘of interest’ eg museums, galleries, handicraft shops -sometimes even food shops – seem to close between September and May, even though as we experienced, the weather can be excellent in September. As a result many places that are quite beautiful can nonetheless feel dead, and its people inaccessible. Though I was craving escape from the business of London, I still enjoy some light bustle in a town – seeing its characters and what they do. I am an anthropologist after all! So I am so grateful that he took the step to open up to us in that way. Thank you Erlendur!

And so, our spirits lifted, we finally arrived at the family fjord a day before the gathering. It felt like a kind of ´coming home´ even being back at the summerhouse. We enjoyed a quiet evening and watched as the snow started to fall again outside. During the night though the wind was so strong the attic room where we slept was shaking quite violently. I didn´t sleep much. The weather the next day was the worst possible for gathering sheep. Horizontal sleet and wind in the wrong direction: it needed to be blowing up the fjord as the sheep were being herded our of the fjord. Apparently they like to have the wind in their faces, otherwise it messes up their hair do! Ironically these adverse conditions made it a lot easier as they all came willingly and many were halfway to the farm already.

The following day was bright and still. I was put in one of the herding lines but found it difficult to keep up the pace rather than stop and look at ice pools that were forming and take pictures of the beautiful light.  But finally it was done. All the sheep from the area are herded into a communal place, then divided up according to their ear marks and taken to their respective farms. Counting is done, cake is eaten. For me, only then did I feel that Summer was truly over. And now is the time for making things, and cooking. Orri´s mum and aunts have been busy making jams, we are learning to knit. I hope to be able to take some of the family´s wollen produce back to England to sell before Christmas. Wool really is the way in winter. I don´t know why we bother with anything else!

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To the Moon and Back

So many landscapes and so many faces have passed before me since I last sat here at this blog, that I don´t know where to begin.  It has been a slightly strange experience being offline for so long, when I had become so used to having everything at my fingertips in the UK. It is refreshing to not look at a screen and my eyes have felt all the better for it. When I was in the mountains I had no need for it, but now I am needing to plan the next stage of our journey, I  find myself in unexpected places looking for public internet access. Happily it has led me to a cozy art space in a very pretty old town where the ferry leaves for Denmark.

Our summer journey started up in the Westfjords, back in June, and we were blessed with good weather and magical overnight spots aplenty. Most of the fjords thankfully do not have bridges across them, and so a journey that is not so long as the crow flies becomes an epic meandering adventure. We have attempted to identify all the possible pools and hot pots our path may cross, and the first evening ‘away’ (whatever that means when you live in a van!) was spent in one of the most beautiful hot pools so far, and I now speak with many miles of experience. We cooked our dinner on an open fire beside the pool, which nestles in some rocks right beside the sea.

Since then we have discovered other magical hotpools, one of which we were lucky enough to have on our doorsteps during our two month stint running a shop-bus in the mountains (just above). The one below we found one sunny evening on the south coast. It is the oldest still functioning pool in Iceland, now ramshackle and algae filled. It was built in 1923 by a father for his son to learn to swim. Now there´s a dedicated father!

Our sea side hot pot was to be the first of many perfect parkups, and Iceland seems to be a very accommodating place for travelling in this way. In short, as long as you are not in a nature reserve, wherever there is a road or track, you may park overnight on it if you are not blocking entry to a farmer´s field or such like. This contrasts to my experience of travelling in a van in England, where there are many signs saying ´no overnight parking´and oftentimes there would be a rather disconcerting knock in the night of some official or other. This is not to say there are not kindly farmers who may let you park in their field, but space that remains for all to use seems to be increasingly hard to find. Sparsely populated countries such as this have such benefits, and people are not so concerned with what you are up to. A sparse population also has its down sides, or at least aspects that I have found difficult to get used to, but more on that later.

We were making our way southwards to the farm where Orri´s mother grew up, and grandmother and uncle still live, to fix up the buses that would become our shop and our home for the summer in the mountains, and buy all the things the shop would sell. Nina and Smari, the current shop-bus owners, have been running it for twelve summers and needed a well deserved break, so called upon Orri and I to step in. Their accumulated experience has made the shop quite a phenomenon, and it is written about in many guide books. It has grown slowly over the years, starting with them selling only fresh fish to tourists on a small campsite. The tourists started asking for oil and butter to fry the fish, then coffee, and so on. And so the shop has slowly become everything one could possibly need in all weathers in the middle of nowhere, AND fresh bread and pastries! The fresh fish is still sold but is now caught by an uncle as the shop has become a full time beast in itself.

We took four buses out into the mountains at Landmannalaugar this year: one shop, one infobus/nice sitting place, and two homes for the shop people. The buses are all old american school buses, except one. The oldest dates from 1968, and it was quite an adventure getting them all up there, mostly on dirt roads and crossing a fair few rivers on the way. I couldn´t quite believe the sight. It was like a scene out of  a bizarre road movie!

The buses all arrived soundly and we got set up and started. I was glad to make so many travellers happy all summer, but I have to admit it was rather too busy for my liking. This year there seemed to be as many tourists in the country as Icelanders! But working in such a place, stepping out of the bus at the end of the day into the evening light and being able to just walk up a mountain or valley into a world that seemed as if it had just been born was like walking into another dimension.

It was refreshing to be able to spread our wings a little into a bigger house-in-a-bus than our little Mariubjalla, and to have a cosy space to invite friends to. We had an oven and an oil stove and a bedroom and chairs and even a porch that served as a fridge/ food store – the cold dry wind being an excellent preserving force. It beggared belief: cheeses, vegetables and all sorts would sit there for days without going off. It made me realise how pristine this place was, and that an unpolluted environment makes such a difference to your habits. We felt we needed to wash very seldom, and there was no need for any obsessively product consuming ´cleanliness´. Just a bit of sweeping out the dust and washing up was what the chores amounted to.

We also had many visitors over the two months. Many of Orri´s friends and family ‘dropped by’. (A rather surprising Icelandic trait: Icelanders love to drive, so they will drive hundreds of kilometres to drop by!). I also was blessed with a visit from my best friend Maia and her little one Alec. Maia´s partner Hugh is a volcanologist with a special connection to these mountains. I was in Landmannalaugar last summer with him a month before the birth of his son, so to have the new family there made it a very special gathering. We walked and walked in the days and ate good food and hot potted in the evenings. Alec nearly started walking while he was with us. He seemed to take to the soft bouncy moss that grows over the rocks. My parents also made it all the way from Kenya, but found the temperature difference rather challenging! In August my  friend Ally came to say hello for a few days and said she felt like she had come to the moon. It is not an inaccurate description.

Just before leaving Landmannalaugar at the end of the season to go off on our adventure around Iceland in our  little van Mariubjalla I unexpectedly bumped into an old friend, Max, from university! We were headed in the same direction and kept meeting each other, unplanned, at various places along the South coast. We have headed southeast, down from the highlands to the coast, past many mountains, rivers, waterfalls and glaciers, and are now travelling up the east coast and its majestic fjords with mountains, still snow spattered, rising up into the clouds like green tufted terraced pyramids.

The evenings are much shorter now, with twilight starting at eight and darkness by ten. So the days of midnight walks are over, but it has been dry so we have had happy evenings around the fire, with all the sounds and smells that a new night in a new place brings.

We have enjoyed creative campfire cooking, and even made a stone oven in the fire the other night. Autumn is here with all its offerings and the little reddening leaves that sprout and scramble from the mossy ground are hanging heavy with bilberries and blueberries. In between, especially where there is a grove of birch trees, mushrooms push up – some fine and delicate, others weighty and firm. Orri bought an edible mushroom identification book, as all we recognised for sure were the brown birch boletus and fly agaric, and soon after we found ourselves in a very promising birch forest. We had forgotten our foraging basket so decided to try our hands at weaving them ourselves. Orri promptly went foraging and came back with a hoard so big and so varied we are still eating them four days later!

And so our journey continues northward, then west, through the kaleidoscopic Autumn, stopping here and there and wherever we feel like seeing what´s down that track. I have just been in a small town called Eskifjordur – a fishing village with an unusual sense of its past. Old warehouses with their own jetties line the shore and each house has a name. There is also the ubiquitous hamburger joint (which unfortunately seems to be the national dish, though thankfully not MacDonalds), a petrol station, a shop, a coffeehouse, a bank and a post office.

These things seem to be what most towns and villages amount to, and they have extraordinarily short opening hours. I have found it difficult to get used to, coming from a place where there was so much more ‘going on’. Not that I have come on this journey to be entertained by what towns have to offer, but when you drive 600km without passing a single cinema, I begin to wonder where people go to collectively experience things. Every town and village has a swimming pool, and that seems to be the focus of communal life. Of course there is much neighbourliness also, but passing through, one is not part of the community and so not subject to that neighbourliness. And so I feel like a bit of an island, drifting through places without being able to get in them.

Happily it is out in wild nature that I am most content and She has been endlessly welcoming, with new treasures and new challenges every day. I am looking forward to going back to the Westfjords where there is both stunning landscapes and a family network that I am part of, people I know. We are aiming to arrive there by the end of the month to help with the annual family sheep gathering where the flock is herded down from the mountain to a warm barn for the winter, which can be very long and harsh up there. Some sheep are vagabonds and decide to stay in the wilds, but most want to move inside.

We have adapted our own home to the cooling temperature by insulating it with sheeps’ fleeces, which seems to be working incredibly well, and not smelling very much at all!

It is some of the finest and warmest wool in the world and I couldn´t quite believe it when Orri´s uncle let us drive into his shearing barn and help ourselves to as many as we needed! This, for me,  is a most touching aspect of the ‘Icelandic way’: if you are part of a family network you are provided for in unimaginable ways. Everybody gives, so nobody is lacking.

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